My first Hacktoberfest :)

Who am I ?

Hey, I am Swarnava. I am from India. I go by Swarn10 on GitHub. I am a student at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-KGP). I love data structures and algorithms a lot. I am also into Competitive Programming. I like coding and learning new concepts of computer-science in my free time. I also love football, big Man Utd fan :p.

Background

I am not new to open source. I had been previously exposed to open source by a senior of mine at college, but I could hardly find time to contribute. This year however due to the COVID-19, I could be at home in my peace of mind and could contribute to the open source community which I was wanting to do since a very long time.
I like coding as already mentioned. Whenever I find some time, I look up something new and try to understand and think about new problems. Since, I am also into competitive programming, problem-solving is another thing which I get my kick out of from coding.

Progress

I feel extremely happy to announce that I have successfully completed this year's Hacktoberfest challenge. One was supposed to make 4 PRs to complete the challenge. It was only after my 4 PRs passed the review period that I thought of sharing this with the community.

Contributions

Since, I am a lot in DS & Algorithms and also Competitive Programming, I contributed mainly to those repositories that were based on DS & Algo and were looking for contributors to improve the repo by solving problems and adding them to the repository, so that it could act as a resource for people who are/will be preparing for software interviews. I feel extremely happy to have been able to do atleast some good for those people out there by contributing in whatever way I could, and it was all possible because of open source and Hacktoberfest. Thank you Hacktoberfest and DigitalOcean.
The following is the list of my 5 PRs :-

1. https://github.com/pratik-choudhari/AlgoCode/pull/90
2. https://github.com/pratik-choudhari/AlgoCode/pull/133
3. https://github.com/rohan8594/DS-Algos/pull/17
4. https://github.com/ahampriyanshu/algo_ds_101/pull/1153
5. https://github.com/vJechsmayr/PythonAlgorithms/pull/434

Reflections

For me, it has been truly a wonderful experience. I felt like I was doing social service just by coding :).
The rules were so simple and everything was co-ordinated and carried out in such a seemless fashion.
I learnt a lot during this phase, making my code more readable, adding proper documentation, talking to the owner of the repo in case of any confusion etc. This truly had an overall impact on me.
Last but not the least I can't thank Hacktoberfest and DigitalOcean enough for such a great initiative. I would definitely love to come back and contribute more for the open-source community in the next year.

Peace !!!